If you look closely at this picture, you will see a vertical-ish line of green curving to the right of the two trains (just lower-left of centre). This is what remains of the platform of the station from which coffins and mourners set out for Brookwood cemetery in Surrey where there was a corresponding station to receive them. It was bombed in the second world war and never rebuilt but the station building still stands on Westminster Bridge Road as you can see in the photograph below.

On Saturday, I sneaked around the back of it, climbed up a flight of steps, found a gate left providentially open and managed to get out onto the area adjacent to the line. It is strange up there - a wide brick tundra three storeys above street level with trains and signals clanking and flashing and nobody to see them.

The train was operated by The Necropolis Railway Company (really) and first, second and third class carriages were available although I have never been able to find out whether this was implemented on a purely financial basis or enforced according to the social standing of the mourners - or corpse.

Yes - hundreds of people now pass it everyday without realising - but this once would have been a very significant place for Londoners. The railway ran from the middle of the the nineteenth century until the Luftwaffe saw it off so would have carried hundreds of thousands of the dead.

I often wonder who the last (deceased) passenger was - and whether you had to have an advance ticket for them.

That's an amazing picture, the signals with nobody to see or hear. Worthy of sneaking up with a video camera, perhaps? In New York, they've built a park on unused railway track:http://www.thehighline.org/